WILLIAM STUBBS
Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history
and kindred subjects
page 361

XIII.] CANON LAW IN ENGLAND.
just as much was the study of the civil law also. I think that I am right' in repeating that it was mainly as a branch of church law that the civil law was studied at all ; but I do not mean that it was so exclusively. In the infancy of international law and the administration of both admiralty and martial law, the English jurists had to go beyond their insular practice, and to no other source could they apply themselves ; hence the association which to the present day has subsisted between the curiously unconnected departments of maritime and matrimonial jurisdiction. It is really owing to the distinction between scientifically and empirically trained lawyers. Of the indirect influence of scientific jurisprudence on the common law and chancery I have spoken already. .
England has then for at least two centuries before the ^ Reformation a body of law and a body of judges, for ecclesiastical and allied questions, quite apart from the law and judicial staff of the secular courts ; and, with the growth of the Universities, she begins to have educational machinery for training her lawyers. In this department of work, however, the scientific study has a long start and advantage over the empirical. The common law has to be learned by practising in the courts, or by attending on their sessions. The apprentices and Serjeants of the Inns, of Court learn their work in London ; their study is in the year books and the statute book, a valuable and even curiously interesting accumulation of material, but thoroughly insular, or less than that, simply English. The canonists and civilians have also their house in London, the 'Hospitium dominorum
advocatorum de arcubus,' but they are scarcely less at home
at Rome and Avignon. The canonist and civilian learn the
legal language of entire Christendom; the London lawyer
sticks to his Norman-French. The Norman-French of
Westminster is unintelligible beyond the Channel and beyond
the border. Scotland, the sister kingdom, is toiling without

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